Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia Doobo Shim NATIONAL UNIVERSITY of SINGAPORE
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Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia Doobo Shim NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE Over the past few years, an increasing amount of Korean popular cultural content – including television dramas, movies, pop songs and their associated celebrities – has gained immense popularity in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other East and Southeast Asian countries.1 News media and trade magazines have recognized the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia by dubbing it the ‘Korean wave’ (Hallyu or Hanryu in Korean). The Associated Press reported in March 2002: ‘Call it “kim chic”. All things Korean – from food and music to eyebrow-shaping and shoe styles – are the rage across Asia, where pop culture has long been dominated by Tokyo and Hollywood’ (Visser, 2002). According to Hollywood Reporter, ‘Korea has transformed itself from an embattled cinematic backwater into the hottest film market in Asia’ (Segers, 2000). Yet a few years ago Korean popular culture did not have such export capacity, and was not even critically acclaimed by scholars. For example, The Oxford History of World Cinema, published in 1996, is alleged to have covered ‘every aspect of international film-making’ but does not make any reference to Korean cinema, although it pays tribute to Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese and Japanese films (Nowell-Smith, 1996).2 Korean music was also ignored by researchers, as can be seen in the following comment in World Music: The Rough Guide, published in 1994: ‘The country has developed economically at a staggering pace, but in terms of popular music there is nothing to match the remarkable contemporary sounds of Indonesia, Okinawa, or Japan’ (Kawakami and Fisher, 1994). The tremendous disparity between such evaluations as noted above, and the recent success of the Korean media, has stimulated Media, Culture & Society © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 28(1): 25–44 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443706059278] Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on August 20, 2016 26 Media, Culture & Society 28(1) me to learn, theorize and explain their growth and increased circulation in Asia. The major frame of reference in international communication research today is globalization, a word that has become part of everyday vocabulary. The term refers to the process and context of the world becoming integrated, and it is most exuberantly used in corporate slogans. If we are satisfied with this uncritical discourse of a seamless globe, our under- standing of globalization will be entrenched in the image of Chinese (or Thai) people patronizing Starbucks – an image that appears on a regular basis in the mainstream media (see, for example, Truehart, 1998). There are roughly three strains of globalization discourse. The first approach views globalization as an outgrowth of cultural imperialism following the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) discussions of the 1970s. According to this approach, forces of globalization are usually American, and they subjugate weaker, national/ cultural identities. While this approach has retained considerable resonance within the political discourse of developing countries, especially with the rise of foreign television programming in their territories, it has been critiqued by some scholars as being overly simplistic (Chadha and Kavoori, 2000; Morley and Robins, 1995). In fact, it is no longer the case that a one- way flow of Western media content exists due to the increasing contraflow in international media (Thussu, 2000) and the growing plurality of regional media players based on what Straubhaar (1991) calls the ‘cultural prox- imity’ factor (also, see Hoskins and Mirus, 1988). In addition, this approach has missed the complexity of audience reception of media content (Wasko et al., 2001). Finally, there is a danger of romanticizing and fetishizing ‘national’ culture (Morris, 2002). In the second view, globalization is understood as an outcome of the workings of the project of modernity (Giddens, 1991). According to Tomlinson, it is ‘the spread of the culture of modernity itself. This is a discourse of historical change, of “development”, of a global movement towards . capitalism’ (1991: 90). This argument is already visible in Weber’s (2000) idea that capitalism is a natural extension of the progress of reason and freedom associated with the Enlightenment. In more recent sociological studies, Harvey (1990) and Jameson (1996) argue that human- ity has entered a new historical epoch since the 1970s (moving from modernity to postmodernity; from capitalism to late capitalism), made possible by the development of new technologies. Some political econo- mists critique this notion by arguing that the conflation of modernity with capitalism is wrong. According to Wood (1998), when the 18th-century French bourgeoisie – supposedly the source of the project of modernity – fought against the aristocracy, they fought for universalism and human emancipation. On the other hand, the main aim of capitalism is not the improvement of humanity, but the improvement of property. Therefore, if Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on August 20, 2016 Shim, Korean popular culture in Asia 27 capitalism has anything to do with modernity, it is that capitalism has destroyed modernity. Wood argues that the geographic term ‘globalization’ is imperfect as a description of and explanation for the present era. It is better characterized as the universalization of capitalism, with capitalism penetrating into every aspect of life, society and culture. In a similar vein, McChesney (1998) criticizes the notion of globalization as an outcome of modernity because it tends to provide an aura of ‘inevitability’ to the rise of neoliberalism and concentrated corporate control (and hyper- commercialization) of the media in the present era. The third approach comprises discourses that identify cultural hybridity and investigate power relations between periphery and centre from the perspective of postcolonial criticism (Kraidy, 2002; Shome and Hegde, 2002). Paradoxically, globalization encourages local peoples to redicover the ‘local’ that they have neglected or forgotten in their drive towards Western-imposed modernization during the past decades (Featherstone, 1993; Robertson, 1995). There are two distinct modes of re-localization in non-Western political and cultural formations. While some forces and groups – such as Hindu nationalists in India, and the Taleban in Afghanistan – campaign for a return to the imagined ‘good old days’, others – such as the Asian tiger economies – revisit or strengthen their own developmental routes by embracing and utilizing the new glocal economic situation (Chadha and Kavoori, 2000). In this transnational context of a meeting between the periphery and the centre, hybridity reveals itself as new practices of cultural and performative expression. For example, locals appropriate global goods, conventions and styles, including music, cuisine, cinema, fashion and so on, and inscribe their everyday meaning into them (Bhabha, 1994; Young, 2003). In engaging the postcolonial notion of hybridity, I do not view it simply as a descriptive device, but as a ‘communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangement’ (Kraidy, 2002: 317). Therefore, the political economic relations immanent in the first and second lines of discourse are inevitably involved in an under- standing of Korean media development as a metaphor for thinking about the complex relations of cultures to the forces of globalization. It is also important to reveal the political potential inherent in hybridity, following Bhabha’s (1994) observation that natives and minorities strike back at imperial domination by recourse to the hybridization strategy. Given this, the Korean wave phenomenon is an interesting case to study in the context of international communication. First, we shall examine the role of the Korean state in order to understand how the periphery addresses the context of global media power differences. And, second, we shall inquire into how Koreans appropriate global popular cultural forms to express their local sentiment and culture. Downloaded from mcs.sagepub.com at Duke University Libraries on August 20, 2016 28 Media, Culture & Society 28(1) This article is composed of the following sections: (1) What is the Korean wave?; (2) Korean media liberalization and development; (3) Cultural hybridization and the Korean pop music industry; and, finally, (4) Conclusion and discussion. In the next section, I will examine the processes by which Korean television dramas, music and movies have come to appeal to audiences in neighbouring countries. Through this, we shall understand the degree of popularity that Korean media content and its associated celebrities have enjoyed, and the reactions of Korean businesses and the government to this surprising ‘national’ achievement. What is the Korean wave? For a start, the Korean wave is indebted to the media liberalization that swept across Asia in the 1990s. The Korean wave seems to have come into existence sometime around 1997, when the national China Central Tele- vision Station (CCTV) aired a Korean television drama What is Love All About?, which turned out to be a big hit. In response to popular demand, CCTV re-aired the program in 1998 in a prime-time slot, and recorded the second-highest ratings ever in the history of Chinese television (Heo, 2002). In 1999, Stars in My